Even just the act of always having milk around, or presenting cereal as a viable option for food, is part of the same advertising mentality that I mean. It doesn't seem like it's there, especially since it was never overt, but because we've been told for a long time through ads that cereal with milk (or oats with milk, or creamed wheat with milk) is "breakfast" food, we accept it as the natural order of things. My family never learned how to drink milk straight either--I also was repulsed by the idea of drinking milk on it's own (my mom NEVER did the milk+cookies thing--we had TEA and cookies XD).
But, milk was ever present in our home, as was bread. These are the kinds of things that we take for granted as "staples" without thinking why it is that we have them in the house.
Yeah, it is odd how few people actually followed the food pyramid to any extent. I remember when I first raised the question of, "How am I supposed to even eat that many servings of grains in a day AND all the other things? I'm a fairly small girl, and even if I only eat the lower end of the numbers, I'll be way too full at basically every meal." My teacher, if I remember correctly, did a strange dance around actually answering my question, and ended up talking about something like understanding serving size to calculate calories on a label.
But the real point is, of course, to become aware of how deeply ingrained the values of advertisements have become to our daily perception of edible food within a household. After all, as you're no doubt becoming aware through your own experiences with things like bento, there are other cultures that embrace entirely different priorities and staples for food, and do not have the same principles guiding their food preparation whatsoever. (For instance, the importance of butter and herbs in French cooking versus the importance of soy sauce/shoyu, sald, sugar, and mirin/sake in Japanese cooking//the emphasis on meat in Scottish breakfasts versus the chutneys and stuffed breads in Indian/Hindu breakfasts).
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Date: 2011-02-07 06:44 pm (UTC)But, milk was ever present in our home, as was bread. These are the kinds of things that we take for granted as "staples" without thinking why it is that we have them in the house.
Yeah, it is odd how few people actually followed the food pyramid to any extent. I remember when I first raised the question of, "How am I supposed to even eat that many servings of grains in a day AND all the other things? I'm a fairly small girl, and even if I only eat the lower end of the numbers, I'll be way too full at basically every meal." My teacher, if I remember correctly, did a strange dance around actually answering my question, and ended up talking about something like understanding serving size to calculate calories on a label.
But the real point is, of course, to become aware of how deeply ingrained the values of advertisements have become to our daily perception of edible food within a household. After all, as you're no doubt becoming aware through your own experiences with things like bento, there are other cultures that embrace entirely different priorities and staples for food, and do not have the same principles guiding their food preparation whatsoever. (For instance, the importance of butter and herbs in French cooking versus the importance of soy sauce/shoyu, sald, sugar, and mirin/sake in Japanese cooking//the emphasis on meat in Scottish breakfasts versus the chutneys and stuffed breads in Indian/Hindu breakfasts).